Jongsuk Yoon
VAULT looks at the work of Korean-born, German-based artist Jongsuk Yoon whose work hovers between landscape and abstraction.
Image credit: Jongsuk Yoon, Blue Mountains, 2023, oil on canvas, 160 × 130 cm. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery
When Jongsuk Yoon paints clouds, mountains and streams in a palette of pale blue, bright yellow and soft pink, the 59-year-old artist accesses her intense memories of a South Korean countryside childhood mixed with the European influences of the second half of her life to date.
For Yoon, born in 1965 in Onyang, the mixing of cultures is filtered into something new: a Korean philosophy of seeing herself as a small part within her canvases and the wider universe, combined with a love of European Expressionism, which places the individual outside of the painting.
“Some people, particularly in the United States, see colour field painting as an inspiration,” says Philipp Kaiser, president of Marian Goodman Gallery, which recently staged Yoon’s first solo show in the United States – Yellow May (2004), in Los Angeles.
“On a literal and metaphorical level, the influence has more to do with clouds of memories that appear and disappear. It has a very phenomenological quality. Also, where do you stand in these pictures? This is especially true in the very monumental ones that look like a stage set.”
In Korea, Yoon’s late father owned a calligraphy gallery. “She had to have a cultural cleanse, in a way, to define herself in a new context,” explains Kaiser.
Yoon first came to Europe at age 28, studying art at the Kunstakademie Münster in 1996 before heading to the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf from 1997 to 2001, lured by the large Japanese community in the city and the fact that Korean video art pioneer Nam June... Subscribe to read all articles in full
